The digital
disruption and the talent shortage
You have
probably already faced parts of it. Whether it is the transformed client
relationship management through social media, the upheaval in procurement and
alliances in multi-sided platforms or the increased part of revenue now coming
in through your internet channels, your organization hardly bears any resemblance
to what it was a mere two or three years ago.
Well, you
haven’t seen the best part yet. Digital technologies are poised to impact every
single element of your value chain, achieving the transformation of your
pop-and-mom organization into a vibrant, agile, high flying digital
organization.
Expect a
few surprises during the ride. These technologies will continue to transfer
large parts of your revenue generating operations to the virtual world.
McKinsey, for instance, expects that consumer finance internet operations will
account for more than 40% of revenue by 2017. (Finding your digital sweet spot,
October 2013). More generally, the cost base of all industries will decrease
through the use of digital technologies and incumbents will be hard pressed to
reorganize their operations to keep pace with more agile new entrants, that do
not have the burden of legacy systems.
But let’s
take a closer look at this change in your organization’s DNA. It is brought
about by a complex combination of technologies that are already mature but
which are gaining mainstream status at a quicker pace than we were used to.
Most of these are digital technologies (like cloud computing, big data, facial
recognition, 3D-Printing or social technologies), even if corporations should
also be on the outlook for unexpected breakthroughs in life sciences or
environmental sciences.
You could
argue that the transformation made possible by these technologies is already
under way and some leaders might even boast of important successes. That might
be true but it only tells half the story: the most important element to
understand is that these first successes have been based on process or system changes,
like automation of processes or improvement in automation of processes and
improvement in data management and insights.
To move
further along the digital transformation path, companies need to change the way
their employees collaborate internally and externally. A specific breed of
digital technologies, social technologies (best known as corporate social
networks) are at the forefront of this change. According once again to
McKinsey, social technologies have the potential to increase knowledge worker
productivity by as much as 25%. To reach that prize of productivity improvement,
much deeper changes that the ones that drove the first wave of digital
transformation are needed. We think that, to engage in the way of success, organizations
should manage a triple evolution, an evolution in their ways of working, an
evolution in their management practices and an evolution in their organizational
design.
The
evolution in ways of working will take time as it entails new computer and IT
skills, new real-time and contextual awareness and new collaborative
behaviours. It will demand new learning and development strategies, and
therefore will be long in the making.
In
management practices, there will be a need to expand on much needed “command-and-control”
practices by designing and implementing new governance practices at all levels.
These government practices will aim at bringing operational and functional
managers together in new collaborative decision making practices. The objective
will be to develop a culture in which contextual decision making by any manager
takes into account the complexity of the organization she is in, and not only
its own functional or business unit priorities.
And
finally, as organization design is concerned, there will be a double challenge:
to experiment with new organizational structures that are made possible by the
use of digital technologies, as many companies have already started doing with
professional communities; and then, in a more fundamental way, to rethink the
way in which work positions are designed and linked together.
Enhancing
talent development for the digital workplace
Having
quickly gone through the changes that are needed to bring about the digital
workplace, how difficult it is to define the new managerial talent that will be
needed for that purpose! It is difficult because the skills, the mindset, the
ethics and the passion that define them are an evolution from the ones that we
usually associate with managerial and executive talent.
Before
briefly discussing these talents and some strategies to develop them, a very
important point needs to be made: the new organization will need more, and not
less, managerial talent, as is sometime argued by the gurus of “social
business” or the “digital organization”. As digital technologies push
operations and decision-making towards real-time, complexity reaches new
heights; and as technology transforms the competitive dynamics of most
industries, more and more decisions are made at the edges of the organisation.
As a result, it is safe to argue that a higher number of talented managers is
needed to understand and act on the new business context. But not all
organizations are ready to develop this new generation of managerial talent.
There have
been discussions about this new managerial talent these past few years, often
uncovering some paradoxes: the skills needed for execution might not suffice
for successful innovation; the focus on results that defines great general management
might be a hindrance for visionary leadership; the excellence at managing
control systems might prevent IT or HR leaders from expanding their leadership
scope; …
How, then,
to fire-start the talent management evolution that will drive the digital
transformation? We would like to suggest a strategy based on two principles: “Engage
and Let go” & “Make Everyone a CIO”.
Why “Engage
and let go”? Well, to be sure, the digital transformation should bring
innovation much higher in the leadership agenda. It can be argued that the
focus on innovation should be as important as the focus on efficiency that has
been every organization’s overarching goal for the past century.
It is why,
Learning and Development programs should aim at engaging managers to be the main
drivers in the digital transformation, and making them responsible for
developing the skills and abilities that are demanded by the particular digital
context of their organization. Engaging first, to make managers responsible for
their own and the organization’s evolution; letting go then, an even more
important step for Learning and Development programs, that should carefully
listen to and monitor to managers as they learn and evolve, in order to
identify next practices and skills with which to craft their own programs.
Engage and
let go, or Open Learning and Development with a beta mentality.
The need to
“Make everyone a CIO” is probably more obvious as digital technologies continue
their invasion of the organization’s operations. The not-so-obvious aspect is
how to reach this goal. We propose a number of easy steps to get you started on
this :
a) Focus basic and entre-level training
activities on developing common ways of working (a “collaborative way”, as it
were). The following topics could help to start a curriculum:
- Using the technology (learning to collaborate through social technologies and with digital technologies);
- Managing collaboration (learning to manage the collaboration of one’s team taking advantage of these technologies’ features);
- Framing collaboration (real-time design of collaboration spaces, like virtual communities, circles of workspaces, as explained in “From Push to Pull” from John Hagel and John Seely Brown)
b) Develop a “slow learning” university
that focuses on developing an awareness of the larger digital context of your
organization for all managers. This university should include courses on topics
such as:
- Identifying and learning the main technological trends impacting one’s industry, in the context of the competitive dynamics in the new digital world: cloud, consumerisation, socialisation, automatisation, …
- Understanding the impact of these digital technologies on one’s industry, at all levels, both internally and externally;
- Understanding the competitive dynamics of the software industry and how it impacts current and future development of applications within one’s industry;
- Understanding new governance and decision-making practices that take advantage of social technologies features;
c) Finally, develop a pipeline for
development opportunities that focuses on IT projects (developing a social
website, upgrading IT infrastructure, building a mobile application, …), and in
which IT managers and business managers collaborate to learn from each other.
This is
just a beginning, but it should help you start moving your best talent in the
right direction.
I would
like to conclude on these thoughts on managing the digital corporation with a
last idea on management dashboards. Social technologies have just begun their
integration with other digital technologies, both new applications and legacy
systems. This trend should continue in the years to come, if you follow the
strategic moves of such giants as Microsoft or SAP.
There’s a
fair chance that these players are looking at their own breed of social
technologies as their Trojan Horse inside your IT operations. To be sure,
social technologies will soon gain center stage in the Employee-experience of
your organization and therefore become a key asset for development and
retention purposes.
Corporations
moving towards mastery of their digital strategy should think of social
technologies as the opportunity to build a collective dashboard for their
digital enterprise, a dashboard not for command and control purposes but for
collective decision-making. You could imagine a fractal dashboard in which
every employee would have access to all the data, assets, knowledge,
applications and people of the corporation depending on his context.
And there’s
no science-fiction here: Isn’t Google already building such a personal
dashboard in the consumer space?
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